A new source of renewable energy from lightning stroke: A small scale system

Abstract

This paper describes about the method for harvesting the new source of renewable energy from lightning stroke in a small-scale system. It is known that lightning can produce huge scale of electricity. The restriction in harvesting the gratis lightning energy is regarding the process to detain and store the energy within a microsecond according to the typical lightning wave shape. Due to that, a small-scale laboratory is set up based on natural characteristics of lightning. The purpose is to determine the performance and potential of the sampling capacitor as storage for the electricity produced by lightning. In this paper, the results of the laboratory experiment focusing on the sampling capacitors were presented. The capacitors are subjected to 1.2/50μ8, 4.2kV single-stroke impulse voltages. The results show that the small-scale system successfully illustrates the concept of capturing energy from lightning return strokes that can be a potential source of renewable energy.